Two new worms use St. Valentine’s Day as bait
PandaLabs, Panda Security’s laboratory for detecting and analyzing malware, has detected two new worms, Nuwar.OL and Valentin.E, which use the topic of St. Valentine’s Day to spread. I suppose you could call them love bugs.
Both Nuwar.OL and Valentin.E arrive by email with Valentine-themed subject lines. They may even appear to have been sent by someone you know.
The first one of these worms, Nuwar.OL, uses an email with subjects like “I Love You Soo Much,” “Inside My Heart” or “You’re In My Dreams” to trick the recipient into opening the website that downloads it. The webpage is very simple – a romantic greeting card with a large pink Valentine’s Day heart. Surprise!
Once it has infected a computer, Nuwar.OL spreads itself by sending out a large number of emails to people in the user’s email address book. This activity can slow down both the infected computer and the local network.
Valentin.E also spreads by email. Watch out for messages with subjects like “Searching for true Love” or “True Love” and an attached file called “friends4u.scr.” If you run the file, Valentin.E shows a new desktop background to distract you while it makes several copies of itself on the computer and emails copies of itself to all your friends.
“Both cases are clear examples of social engineering techniques used to spread malware. They use attractive subjects – Valentine’s Day greeting cards, romantic desktop themes, etc. – to entice users to run [email] attachments or click links that ultimately download malware onto their computers,” explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.
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